High taxes kill states. There can be no better evidence than the 2010 Census. The states that lost House seats — because they’re shrinking, relative to the nation — had taxes 27 percent higher than the ones that gained seats.

Of the seven states that don’t have a personal income tax, four (Texas, Florida, Nevada and Washington) account for eight of the 12 seats apportioned to the fastest-growing states.

New York and Ohio lost two more seats. Other losers — down one each — are Massachusetts, Missouri, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana and Iowa. What do they all have in common? High taxes.

With the new Republican power in Washington, it is doubly important to keep a close eye on the doings of GOP Senators and Congressmen to spot those who are straying from orthodoxy, seduced by power and the insider clubiness that characterizes Washington.

In the Lame Duck session, we want to draw attention to six Republican U.S. Senators who voted with the Democrats on a key issue. We should all bear their apostasy in mind and, in particular, make them mindful of the possibility of primary challenges to their re-nomination.

Two Senators, in particular, deserve to have primary challengers take them on in 2012 — Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Mississippi’s Thad Cochran. Both men voted for the START treaty which conceded a permanent edge in nuclear weaponry to Russia. While the Treaty provided for equal and reduced stockpiles of strategic warheads, it did nothing to address the vast piles of tactical nuclear warheads held by the Russians. The Russians have 10,000 of these battlefield nuclear weapons piled up in the stockpile while we have only a few hundred.

In addition, START’s preamble blocks the U.S. from developing missile defenses, now especially important in light of North Korea’s and Iran’s expanding capacities.

Both Corker and Cochran face re-election in 2012. They should both be challenged for the nomination by men who put our need for national security above appeasing the Russians. Having suppressed democracy, wiped out free speech, taken over all the media, nationalized their oil and energy industry, invaded Georgia, enabled the Iranian nuclear program, and tried to establish a natural gas monopoly in Europe, what else does Putin need to do before Corker and Cochran realize that appeasement won’t work?

Bob Corker’s vote for START probably stems from the insider-old boy network on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on which he sits. Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who also voted for START, sits alongside him on the Republican minority on the committee. Led by Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking GOP member on the panel, all three voted for START. Unfortunately, Isakson is not up for re-election until 2016. When he does come up for re-election, we hope that the citizens of Georgia’s Republican Party hold him to account.

Lamar Alexander, also of Tennessee, backed START and faces re-election in 2014.

In a previous column, we called attention to the defections of Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Mike Crapo of Idaho from the ranks of fiscal conservatives. Both Coburn and Crapo voted for the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Reduction Commission which recommended cutting the deductions for home mortgages and charitable contributions by two-thirds for most taxpayers and urged the enactment of almost $1 trillion in new taxes.

Coburn and Crapo only announced their intention to endorse the Commission report after they had been re-elected on November 2, 2010. Now they are safe in their seats until 2016. But we hope to be still writing columns by then and will remind the voters of those two conservative states how ill-served they were by their Republican senators.

On Tuesday — tomorrow — the lame duck Senate will vote on ratifying the START treaty with Russia. It needs 67 votes and we must not let it pass!!!

While maintaining parity in strategic nuclear weapons, it locks in a 10,000 to 200 Russian advantage in tactical nuclear weapons and bars the US from developing interceptor missiles as part of a shield against incoming warheads — whether Russian or Iranian or North Korean.

Putin snookered Hillary and Obama and they are desperate to pass the treaty to appease the left.

There are ten key Republican swing votes. Please let them hear from you by phone and/or fax. Their information is below.

Moving to the center is not a two-dimensional process. It has a third dimension — the difference between strength and weakness. In the course of coming in from the cold of his extreme far-left positions, the president looks like a wimp, abandoning his long-held views in the face of electoral defeats, adverse court rulings, recalcitrant Democrats and strong, united Republican opposition.

And wimps don’t win.

When Bill Clinton moved to the center, he arrived in triumph. After vanquishing the Republican Congress during the government shutdown of 1995-96, he agreed to a balanced-budget deal with Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. But it was his deal, along his lines, on his principles. When he signed a welfare reform bill, he did so after beating back and vetoing two Republican bills that coupled reform with harsh cuts to Medicaid. After he got a bill on his own terms, he signed it.

First, the Senate is jamming through a pork laden budget bill filled with projects that are payoffs to each Senators campaign donors. The budget bill also includes a $1 billion appropriation to fund Obamacare — enough to get it moving. We need to beat this bill! We have enough Republicans to do so if they hold together. But Voynovitch from Ohio and Kit Bond from Missouri are both possible defections. Neither one is running again. We need you to write and call your Senators to urge them to vote no on the budget and particularly no on the Obamacare funding!

Second, they are using their lame duck majority — explicitly rejected by the voters of America — to compromise our national security by ratifying the START treaty.

The treaty limits the US missile defenses and the preamble suggests that we would not engage in any new military technologies to thwart nuclear weapons! It also says we cannot convert any of our rockets into interceptors and it locks in about a ten thousand Russian edge in tactical nuclear warheads. It reduces strategic warheads — where there is now rough parity — but not tactical ones where Russia has a huge advantage.

And, why should we be rewarding Russia by relieving them of the expense of building new missiles and defense systems? Had Reagan followed this line of liberal thinking, the Cold War would never have been won! Remember that Russia’s economy is less than one-tenth the size of ours. So the best way to reduce their power is to make them divert spending into the military. That is the best way to accomplish our basic goal: To bring down a Russia increasingly focused on domination and replace it with a democratic nation that lives at peace with the world.

So please hit the phones!!!!!

Thanks,

Dick

Note: It’s important to let your senator know how you feel about New START. The vote on the treaty will take place soon. Please call your senator in Washington today at 202-224-3121.

The big question in the Middle East these days is: Who has time on their side?

As Iran races to develop its nuclear bomb-making capacity, we have always assumed that time was on the Ayatollah’s side. The Iranian strategy of delay and obfuscation in its negotiations with the West seems to have succeeded in buying Teheran the time it needs for its spinning Centrifuges to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb. The possibility that Iran may acquire advanced anti-aircraft systems from Russia – even though the Kremlin denies it – seems to make the military option of an air strike on Iranian nuclear plants harder and harder for Israel.

But on the West Bank and Gaza, time has always seemed to be on Israel’s side. Time to build settlements, time to expand those already there, and – most important – time to wait out Obama’s four year term in office all work for Netanyahu.

I met Peter Damon when he appeared in the film I produced with Dave Bossie at Citizens United Fahrenhype-911. The movie rebutted Michael Moore’s flick and underscored the urgency of our continued fighting in the war on terror.

Peter was grievously wounded and permanently disabled as a result of his service to our country in the war and yet had the courage and charisma to speak out in our film on the importance of ongoing sacrifice to defend our country.

At the time, I wondered what would become of him. Well, good news. He has developed a career as an outstanding artist.

White House aides are anxious to portray the deal Obama cut with the Republicans over the extension of the Bush tax cuts as a shrewd move to the center. It was nothing of the sort. It was surrender pure and simple.

It was as much of a “compromise” as that reached between Grant and Lee at Appomattox and between Emperor Hirohito and General MacArthur on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945!

When Bill Clinton triangulated, he never abandoned his personal view or his policy preferences. He had always endorsed welfare reform and embraced both the work requirement and the time limit on the dole. He had vetoed previous Republican welfare reform bills because they included Medicaid and food stamp cuts which he has always opposed. When he signed an anti-crime bill, he had always supported GOP positions on the death penalty and truth in sentencing. And when he reached his balanced budget deal, he gave away nothing.

Republicans gnashed their teeth in frustration as the national tide of GOP resurgence washed up against the massive Democratic fortresses in Nevada, Washington state, Colorado and California. When they neither toppled nor faltered, most conservatives resigned themselves to a divided Congress with the Republican House and the Democratic Senate forever at war.

Not so. The vote on the extension of the Bush tax cuts reveals that the Republican Party has, in fact, gained effective control of the U.S. Senate. We are facing the same situation Ronald Reagan confronted in 1980 when his revolution brought him control of the Senate, but left the House under the nominal reign of Tip O’Neill and the Democrats. But, in fact, as the new president soon discovered, the House Democratic majority was subservient to the tide that had swept the Senate. Terrified by the Republican sweep, the Democrats were unable to muster a coherent opposition in the chamber they controlled. So it will be in 2011.